A sub-container concurrency component of a tiered middleware framework ensures optimistic concurrency for transactions on hierarchical data containers. The component identifies an uppermost container level of a data read for performing a requested data modification to one or more data containers. The component further reads one or more of a parent version value or a child version value of the data container in the uppermost container level at a first time and a second time. Thus, the component writes data to the one or more data containers when each version value, such as the parent version value or the child version value, read at the first time matches its corresponding read version value read at the second time.